Irish Examiner - 08/09/05
Bertie’s fast-track approach is sending the country off the
rails

TRAVELLING around Ireland in summertime is a
very pleasant activity beset by relatively few annoyances.

Yet I'm sure many people will share what for
me is one of those annoyances the frequent sight of the abandoned
and derelict fragments of our once extensive railway system.

That these remaining (and now near useless) fragments
are silent, compelling evidence of the engineering ingenuity and the
hard labour that Irishmen put themselves to in order to provide a
system of communication arteries for their country makes the subsequent
govern-mental (and I do mean govern-mental) decision to discard and
destroy such a system all the more galling. However, I can console
myself that such dreadful errors of strategic thought and action by
government are now in the realm of history.

Surely, no contemporary government, with its
many agencies for strategic planning and implementation, could ignore
the usefulness of our remaining railway infrastructure?

Then I heard our Taoiseach speak on radio of
his determination to 'fast-track' the planning process for the building
of new waste incinerators and I was struck by the irony of his words.

Ireland is a country of just four million the
population of a reasonably sized European city where policy documents
speak of a determination to recycle the greater part of its waste.
Surely only one centrally located incinerator is needed to burn the
un-recyclable remnant left when those policies are fully implemented,
and certainly the safest and best way to transport that easily bulked
material is on the under-utilised rail network rather than in thousands
of heavy lorries on our over-full roads. But in a blackly ironic testament
to our national unawareness of the usefulness of rail, our Taoiseach
can blithely speak of 'fast-tracking' incinerator planning while the
incinerators are planned to be built without any regard to tracks
at all.